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Splunk Enterprise on the AWS Cloud
Quick Start Reference Deployment
February 2017
Bill Bartlett and Roy Arsan – Splunk, Inc.
Shivansh Singh – AWS Quick Start Reference Team
Contents
Overview ................................................................................................................................. 2
Costs and Licenses .............................................................................................................. 3
Architecture ............................................................................................................................ 3
Prerequisites .......................................................................................................................... 5
Specialized Knowledge ....................................................................................................... 5
Planning the Deployment ...................................................................................................... 5
Deployment Options .......................................................................................................... 5
Single Instance vs. Distributed Deployment ..................................................................... 6
Storage ................................................................................................................................ 6
Data Acquisition ................................................................................................................. 7
Instance Selection............................................................................................................... 7
HA/DR Considerations ......................................................................................................8
Indexers .............................................................................................................................. 9
Search Heads ..................................................................................................................... 11
Deployment Steps ................................................................................................................ 12
Step 1. Prepare Your AWS Account .................................................................................. 12
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Step 2. Subscribe to the Splunk Enterprise AMI ............................................................. 13
Step 3. Launch the Quick Start ........................................................................................ 13
Step 4. Send Data to the Splunk Indexers ....................................................................... 18
Troubleshooting ................................................................................................................... 19
Additional Resources ........................................................................................................... 19
Send Us Feedback ............................................................................................................... 20
Document Revisions ........................................................................................................... 20
This Quick Start deployment guide was created by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in
partnership with Splunk, Inc.
Overview
This Quick Start reference deployment guide provides step-by-step instructions for
deploying Splunk Enterprise on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Quick Starts are
automated reference deployments that use AWS CloudFormation templates to launch,
configure, and run the AWS compute, network, storage, and other services required to
deploy a specific workload on AWS.
Splunk is a platform that makes machine data accessible, usable, and valuable to everyone.
By monitoring and analyzing everything from customer clickstreams and transactions to
security events and network activity, Splunk software helps customers gain
valuable Operational Intelligence from their machine-generated data. With a full range of
powerful search, analysis, and visualization capabilities and pre-packaged content for use
cases, any user can quickly discover and share insights.
Splunk Enterprise enables you to search, monitor, and analyze machine data from any
source to gain valuable intelligence and insights across your entire organization. With
Splunk Enterprise on the AWS Cloud, you gain all of the flexibility of the AWS
infrastructure to tailor a deployment specific to your needs, and you can modify your
Splunk deployment on demand, as these needs change. Lead times waiting for hardware to
change or to scale your Splunk deployment are no longer a consideration with AWS.
This Quick Start is for IT infrastructure architects, administrators, and DevOps
professionals who are planning to implement or extend their Splunk Enterprise deployment
on the AWS Cloud.
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Costs and Licenses You are responsible for the cost of the AWS services used while running this Quick Start
reference deployment. There is no additional cost for using the Quick Start.
The AWS CloudFormation template for this Quick Start includes configuration parameters
that you can customize. Some of these settings, such as instance type, will affect the cost of
deployment. For cost estimates, see the pricing pages for each AWS service you will be
using.
This Quick Start requires a subscription to the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Splunk
Enterprise, which is available from AWS Marketplace. For subscription instructions, see
step 1 in the deployment steps. The AMI offers a 60-day trial license that provides limited
access to Splunk Enterprise features. In order to utilize the deployment created by this
Quick Start, you will need to obtain a Splunk Enterprise license by contacting
Architecture Deploying this Quick Start for a new virtual private cloud (VPC) with default
parameters builds the following Splunk Enterprise environment in the AWS Cloud.
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Figure 1: Quick Start architecture for Splunk Enterprise on AWS
The Quick Start sets up the following:
A virtual private cloud (VPC) configured across two Availability Zones. For each
Availability Zone, this Quick Start provisions one public subnet. The Splunk Enterprise
deployment uses each of those subnets.
The Elastic Load Balancing service, which provides HTTP load balancing across the
search head instances.
An IAM user with fine-grained permissions for access to AWS services necessary for the
deployment process.
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Appropriate security groups for each instance or function to restrict access to only
necessary protocols and ports.
In the public subnets, EC2 instances for Splunk Enterprise, including the following:
– Splunk indexing cluster with the number of indexers you specify (3-10)
– Splunk search heads, either stand-alone or clustered, based on your input
– Splunk license server and index cluster master
– Splunk search head deployer, where applicable
If you decide to deploy Splunk Enterprise into your existing VPC (see Deployment Options
later in this guide), the Quick Start assumes that the infrastructure components already
exist, and deploys Splunk Enterprise into the environment you specify during deployment.
Prerequisites
Specialized Knowledge
Before you deploy this Quick Start, we recommend that you become familiar with the
following AWS services. (If you are new to AWS, see Getting Started with AWS.)
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
Elastic Load Balancing
You should also be familiar with core Splunk concepts, including both indexer clustering
and search head clusters.
Planning the Deployment Before you deploy Splunk Enterprise on AWS, please review the following sections for
guidelines on nodes, instance types, storage, and high availability / disaster recovery
(HA/DR) considerations for deployment.
Deployment Options This Quick Start provides two deployment options:
Deploy Splunk Enterprise into a new VPC (end-to-end deployment). This option builds a new AWS environment consisting of the VPC, subnets, security
groups, and other infrastructure components, and then deploys Splunk Enterprise
into this new VPC.
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Deploy Splunk Enterprise into an existing VPC. This option provisions Splunk
Enterprise in your existing AWS infrastructure.
The Quick Start also lets you configure additional settings such as CIDR blocks, instance
types, and Splunk Enterprise settings, as discussed later in this guide.
Single Instance vs. Distributed Deployment Before you deploy a Splunk cluster, you’ll need to decide whether to deploy a single node or
create a distributed environment.
A single-node deployment is one server providing all Splunk-related functionality,
including license server, indexer, and search head. Typical use cases for a single-server
deployment are small-scale, non-HA, low-volume production scenarios, proof of
concept deployments, or dev/test/QA scenarios. We recommend a maximum of 300
GiB/day on a single-node deployment.
A distributed deployment consists of several instances working together to provide
indexing and search head duties. These deployments can range anywhere from two to
hundreds of instances.
Note This Quick Start provides a distributed (clustered) deployment to support
high availability and higher volume environments. If you’re interested in
implementing a single-node deployment for the use cases discussed in this section,
see the Splunk Enterprise on AWS manual deployment guide.
For further information on the dimensions of a Splunk Enterprise deployment on AWS, see
the Splunk Enterprise capacity planning manual.
Storage In most circumstances, the deployment type and use cases will dictate the type of storage
you use.
When deploying a non-clustered environment, either single-server or distributed, we
recommend utilizing EBS volumes and EBS-optimized instance types.
When architecting a clustered solution, there are two storage options available:
Instance storage is temporary, and is often referred to as ephemeral storage. Once
the instance is terminated or crashes, all data stored on the instance is lost.
An EBS volume is persistent, even in the case of instance termination or crash.
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Each option comes with its own feature set and price points. This Quick Start uses EBS
volumes to help ensure high availability and durability for your instances.
Data Acquisition You’ll also need to determine how to best get your data into the Splunk platform.
In most scenarios, we recommend using a Splunk Universal Forwarder (UF) installed
on the machine where the data resides. A simple example of this would be installing the UF
on a webserver to forward the webserver logs to the Splunk indexers.
A Splunk Heavy Forwarder (HF) adds additional capabilities at the forwarding tier. In
more advanced scenarios, an HF may provide the deployment with additional capabilities
that the UF cannot.
For more information about these forwarders, see the Splunk Enterprise documentation.
If a forwarder can’t be installed on the client that is generating data for the Splunk
platform, sending that data directly to Splunk’s HTTP Event Collector (HEC) is an option.
In such situations, we recommend placing Splunk HTTP event collector(s) behind an
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) load balancer, and configuring the client to send the events to
the load balancer address. This makes future scaling easier.
Splunk provides an add-on that will automate data ingestion from several AWS services,
including AWS Config and AWS Config rules, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch,
Amazon Inspector, and Amazon CloudFront. Installing and configuring the add-on will
allow data collection from any of the services a user selects directly to the user’s Splunk
Enterprise deployment.
This guide provides instructions for forwarding data in step 4 of the deployment
instructions.
Instance Selection As a general rule, deployments without Splunk premium solutions, and single-node (non-
clustered) deployments should use C4 instance types. (For information on instance types,
see the AWS website.) This Quick Start uses the c4.large instance type by default, but you
can choose other C4 sizes as well as M4 and R4 instance types. Which instance type to use
depends on how much workload will be delivered to the instance. For Splunk Enterprise,
the workload is defined as both indexing and search. In the following tables,
recommendations are based on typical (average) use, but heavy searching can impact
performance as much as, or more than, heavy indexing.
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The assumptions in the following tables assume Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2)
volumes attached to the C4 instance types. The D2 instance types come with instance
storage, so Amazon EBS is not required. In all situations, we recommend deploying on
dedicated hosts to avoid potentially noisy neighbor situations.
Indexers
Instance type Daily indexing volume (GiB)
(c4 or d2).2xlarge <100
(c4 or d2).4xlarge 100-200
(c4 or d2).8xlarge 200-300+
Search Heads
Instance type Concurrent users
c4.4xlarge Up to 8
c4.8xlarge Up to 16
When using Splunk premium solutions such as Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) or Splunk
IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), we recommend indexer instance types that have a larger
memory footprint. The following information also assumes attached Amazon EBS General
Purpose SSD (gp2) volumes.
Indexers (Splunk Premium Solutions)
Instance type Daily indexing volume (GiB)
r3.8xlarge 100
m4.10xlarge 100-150
Search Heads (Splunk Premium Solutions)
Instance type Concurrent users
r3.8xlarge Up to 16
m4.10xlarge Up to 20
HA/DR Considerations For deployments that require either high availability (HA) or resilient disaster recovery
(DR) capabilities, Splunk Enterprise has built-in clustering technology to safely replicate
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data. There are two clustering options—search head clustering and indexer clustering—that
allow for considerable flexibility when architecting a deployment.
Indexers The Quick Start offers you a choice of 3 to 10 indexers to launch during deployment (the
default is 3).
Indexer Replication
The importance of ensuring resiliency and recoverability of data in the event of a node
failure or other disaster cannot be overstated. One way of doing that at the indexer tier is to
use Splunk indexer replication.
Consider the following three questions when deciding how to provision indexer replication:
Is a secondary site necessary? Does the deployment require a secondary physical
location to mitigate losses in the case of natural disaster or otherwise catastrophic
damage to the primary location? This is called multi-site clustering.
How many copies of data should the cluster replicate? Essentially, how many failed
nodes should the deployment be able to tolerate before data loss? This is called
replication factor (RF). The number of concurrently tolerated failed nodes is RF–1. For
example, if the replication factor is set to 3, then two nodes can fail without data loss.
The Quick Start lets you choose 2-5 copies of data to replicate, and uses a default of 3
copies.
How many immediately searchable copies of data should the cluster retain? This is
called search factor (SF). It is possible to have a replication factor higher than a search
factor if data resiliency is the primary requirement, as opposed to high availability
search capability.
In the case of multi-site clustering, each distinct location is referred to as a site with the RF
and SF configured on a per-site basis. For example, a primary and DR configuration might
configure the total RF and SF to 4. The primary site could maintain three replicated and
searchable copies while the backup/DR site could maintain one copy. A cluster cannot have
a search factor greater than the replication factor.
In AWS deployments, a Splunk Enterprise site will typically be in an Availability Zone or an
AWS Region, depending on requirements. Each Availability Zone is a physically unique
facility, and many customers will find multi-site deployments across multiple Availability
Zones in a single region sufficient for HA. If your requirements are for a physically separate
region, then treating an entire region as a site will fulfill the requirement. This Quick Start
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deploys Splunk Enterprise into two Availability Zones within a single AWS Region to help
ensure high availability.
Figure 2 illustrates an indexer cluster where both SF and RF equal 3.
Figure 2: Splunk single-site cluster architecture
When deciding how to properly provision a clustered deployment, it’s important to consider
the differences in requirements for a replicated-only bucket versus a replicated and
searchable bucket. For a replicated-only bucket, we estimate that roughly 15% of the
original size of indexed data will be copied to the replicated destination(s). For a replicated
and searchable bucket, the estimate increases to about 50% of the original indexed data.
Lastly, note that a Splunk cluster will try to always maintain the appropriate number of
replicated buckets. When a node fails, Splunk will try to re-replicate all buckets on that
failed node across the cluster to maintain the configured replication count.
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We recommend reserving at minimum one indexer’s worth of storage across the cluster, to
allow for such failures without filling up the storage volumes. For example, if a cluster has
10 indexers, and each indexer has 10 TiB of disk space, reserving a minimum of 10 TiB in
total across the cluster (approximately 1 TiB per indexer) would be the suggested course of
action. We recommend keeping a cluster around 80% capacity to allow for both failures
and unexpected spikes in traffic.
Search Heads Search Head Clustering
Similar to indexers, Splunk search head clusters (SHCs) will allow for replication of
configuration, job scheduling, and saved search results. The replication factor (RF) works
the same way as for the indexers; a search head cluster can tolerate simultaneous failures
from RF–1 nodes. Again, similar disk space considerations should be implemented to
accommodate for artifacts being redistributed upon node failure. If you’d like to deploy a
search head cluster, set the SHCEnabled parameter to yes during Quick Start
deployment.
Elastic Load Balancing
The AWS Elastic Load Balancing service can provide a Splunk Enterprise deployment with
an additional layer of fault tolerance in a few different scenarios. Deploying in front of a
search head cluster is one such scenario.
When deploying a Splunk search head cluster, you should place all search heads behind an
ELB load balancer to help ensure the highest availability. When you place the SHC
instances in different Availability Zones, and the load balancer directs traffic across only
healthy search heads, any outage in a single Availability Zone will automatically be routed
around by the load balancer.
This Quick Start automatically sets up the Elastic Load Balancing service, which provides
HTTP load balancing across the search head instances.
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Figure 3: Elastic Load Balancing for clustered search heads
Deployment Steps
Step 1. Prepare Your AWS Account
1. If you don’t already have an AWS account, create one at https://aws.amazon.com by
following the on-screen instructions.
2. Use the region selector in the navigation bar to choose the AWS Region where you want
to deploy Splunk Enterprise on AWS.
3. Create a key pair in your preferred region.
4. If necessary, request a service limit increase for the EC2 instance type that you’ve
decided to deploy Splunk Enterprise on (c4.large by default). You might need to do this
if you already have an existing deployment that uses this instance type, and you think
you might exceed the default limit with this reference deployment.
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Step 2. Subscribe to the Splunk Enterprise AMI
This Quick Start requires a subscription to the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Splunk
Enterprise running on Amazon Linux.
The AMI provides a 60-day free Enterprise trial license, which supports a limited set of
features. To take full advantage of the Splunk Enterprise feature set, including distributed
search, you can obtain a license for Splunk Enterprise by contacting [email protected].
To subscribe:
1. Log in to your AWS account.
2. Open the AWS Marketplace page for Splunk Enterprise, and choose Continue.
3. Use the Manual Launch option to launch the AMI into your account on Amazon EC2.
This involves accepting the terms of the license agreement and receiving confirmation
email. For detailed instructions, see the AWS Marketplace documentation.
4. If you’re using a BYOL license, place the license key file for the software in an Amazon
S3 bucket. You’ll be prompted for the bucket name and URL in step 3.
Step 3. Launch the Quick Start
Note You are responsible for the cost of the AWS services used while running this
Quick Start reference deployment. There is no additional cost for using this Quick
Start. For full details, see the pricing pages for each AWS service you will be using in
this Quick Start.
1. Choose one of the following options to launch the AWS CloudFormation template into
your AWS account. For help choosing an option, see deployment options earlier in this
guide.
Option 1
Deploy Splunk Enterprise
into a new VPC on AWS
Option 2
Deploy Splunk Enterprise
into an existing VPC
Launch Launch
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Important If you’re deploying Splunk Enterprise into an existing VPC, make sure
that your VPC has two public subnets in different Availability Zones for the Splunk
indexers and search heads. You’ll be prompted for your VPC settings when you
launch the Quick Start.
Each deployment takes about 10-30 minutes to complete, depending on whether you
decide to enable search head clustering.
2. Check the region that’s displayed in the upper-right corner of the navigation bar, and
change it if necessary. This is where the network infrastructure for Splunk Enterprise
will be built. The template is launched in the US West (Oregon) Region by default.
3. On the Select Template page, keep the default setting for the template URL, and then
choose Next.
4. On the Specify Details page, change the stack name if needed. Review the parameters
for the template. Provide values for the parameters that require input. For all other
parameters, review the default settings and customize them as necessary. When you
finish reviewing and customizing the parameters, choose Next.
In the following tables, parameters are listed by category and described separately for
the two deployment options:
– Parameters for deploying Splunk Enterprise into a new VPC
– Parameters for deploying Splunk Enterprise into an existing VPC
Option 1: Parameters for deploying Splunk Enterprise into a new VPC
View template
AWS Instance and Network Settings:
Parameter label
(name)
Default Description
Splunk Instance Type
(InstanceType)
c4.large EC2 instance type to use for Splunk Enterprise instances. For
guidance on selecting an instance type, see Instance Selection
earlier in this guide.
Key Name
(KeyName)
Requires input Public/private key pair, which allows you to connect securely
to your instance after it launches. When you created an AWS
account, this is the key pair you created in your preferred
region.
Permitted CIDR for
Splunk web interface
(HTTPLocation)
Requires input The CIDR IP range that is permitted to access the Splunk
servers’ web interface. We recommend that you set this value
to a trusted IP range. (Note that a value of 0.0.0.0/0 will allow
access from any IP address.)
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Parameter label
(name)
Default Description
Permitted CIDR for
SSH
(SSHLocation)
Requires input The CIDR IP range that is permitted to access Splunk
Enterprise instances via SSH. We recommend that you set this
value to a trusted IP range. For example, you might want to
grant only your corporate network access to the Splunk
deployment. (Note that a value of 0.0.0.0/0 will allow access
from any IP address.)
Availability Zones
(AvailabilityZones)
Requires input The Availability Zones in the AWS Region where you want to
install Splunk Enterprise. The Quick Start builds a Multi-AZ
environment that requires two Availability Zones. It uses two
Availability Zones from your list and preserves the logical
order you specify.
VPC CIDR
(VPCCIDR)
10.0.0.0/16 CIDR block for the VPC.
Public Subnet 1 CIDR
(PublicSubnet1CIDR)
10.0.1.0/24 CIDR block for the public subnet located in Availability Zone 1.
Public Subnet 2 CIDR
(PublicSubnet2CIDR)
10.0.2.0/24 CIDR block for the public subnet located in Availability Zone
2.
Splunk Settings:
Parameter label
(name)
Default Description
Splunk Admin
Password
(SplunkAdminPassword)
Requires input The password for Splunk Enterprise. This string must be at
least 8 characters long, and may contain letters, numbers, and
symbols.
Splunk Secret
(SplunkSecret)
Requires input Shared cluster secret for the Splunk search head and indexer
clusters. This string must be at least 8 characters long, and
may contain letters, numbers, and symbols.
Splunk License Bucket
(SplunkLicenseBucket)
Requires input The name of the S3 bucket that contains your Splunk license
key file, from step 2. This is required only for BYOL licenses.
Splunk License
S3 Bucket Path
(SplunkLicensePath)
Requires input The path to the S3 bucket that contains your Splunk license
key file, without a leading forward slash (/), from step 2. This
is required only for BYOL licenses.
No. of Splunk Indexers
(SplunkIndexerCount)
3 The number of Splunk Enterprise instances to launch. You can
choose from 3 to 10 instances.
Replication Factor
(SplunkReplicationFactor)
3 The number of copies of data to store in the Splunk indexer
cluster. You can choose from 2-5 copies. For guidance, see
Indexers earlier in this guide.
Indexer Disk Size
(SplunkIndexerDiskSize)
100 The size of the EBS volume attached to the Splunk Enterprise
indexers, in GiB. You can choose a value between 50-16,000.
For guidance, see Instance Selection earlier in this guide.
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Parameter label
(name)
Default Description
Enable Search Head
Cluster?
(SHCEnabled)
no Set this parameter to yes to deploy a Splunk search head
cluster. (The default setting creates a single search head.) For
guidance, see Search Head Clustering earlier in this guide.
AWS Quick Start Configuration:
Parameter label
(name)
Default Description
Quick Start S3 Bucket
Name
(QSS3BucketName)
quickstart-
reference
S3 bucket where the Quick Start templates and scripts are
installed. Use this parameter to specify the S3 bucket name
you’ve created for your copy of Quick Start assets, if you decide
to customize or extend the Quick Start for your own use. The
bucket name can include numbers, lowercase letters,
uppercase letters, and hyphens, but should not start or end
with a hyphen.
Quick Start S3 Key
Prefix
(QSS3KeyPrefix)
splunk/enterprise/
latest
The S3 key name prefix used to simulate a folder for your copy
of Quick Start assets, if you decide to customize or extend the
Quick Start for your own use. This prefix can include numbers,
lowercase letters, uppercase letters, hyphens, and forward
slashes, but should not start or end with a forward slash
(which is automatically added).
Option 2: Parameters for deploying Splunk Enterprise into an existing VPC
View template
AWS Instance and Network Settings:
Parameter label
(name)
Default Description
Splunk Instance Type
(InstanceType)
c4.large EC2 instance type to use for Splunk Enterprise instances. For
guidance on selecting an instance type, see Instance Selection
earlier in this guide.
Key Name
(KeyName)
Requires input Public/private key pair, which allows you to connect securely
to your instance after it launches. When you created an AWS
account, this is the key pair you created in your preferred
region.
Permitted CIDR for
Splunk web interface
(HTTPLocation)
Requires input The CIDR IP range that is permitted to access the Splunk
servers’ web interface. We recommend that you set this value
to a trusted IP range. (Note that a value of 0.0.0.0/0 will allow
access from any IP address.)
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Parameter label
(name)
Default Description
Permitted CIDR for
SSH
(SSHLocation)
Requires input The CIDR IP range that is permitted to access Splunk
Enterprise instances via SSH. We recommend that you set this
value to a trusted IP range. For example, you might want to
grant only your corporate network access to the Splunk
deployment. (Note that a value of 0.0.0.0/0 will allow access
from any IP address.)
VPC ID
(VPCID)
Requires input ID of your existing VPC (e.g., vpc-0343606e).
VPC CIDR
(VPCIDR)
Requires input The CIDR block for your existing VPC (e.g., 10.0.0.0/16).
Public Subnet 1 ID
(PublicSubnet1ID)
Requires input ID of the public subnet in Availability Zone 1 in your
existing VPC (e.g., subnet-a0246dcd).
Public Subnet 2 ID
(PublicSubnet2ID)
Requires input ID of the public subnet in Availability Zone 2 in your
existing VPC (e.g., subnet-b58c3d67).
Splunk Settings:
Parameter label
(name)
Default Description
Splunk Admin
Password
(SplunkAdminPassword)
Requires input The password for Splunk Enterprise. This string must be at
least 8 characters long, and may contain letters, numbers, and
symbols.
Splunk Secret
(SplunkSecret)
Requires input Shared cluster secret for the Splunk search head and indexer
clusters. This string must be at least 8 characters long, and
may contain letters, numbers, and symbols.
Splunk License Bucket
(SplunkLicenseBucket)
Requires input The name of the S3 bucket that contains your Splunk license
key file, from step 2. This is required only for BYOL licenses.
Splunk License
S3 Bucket Path
(SplunkLicensePath)
Requires input The path to the S3 bucket that contains your Splunk license
key file, without a leading forward slash (/), from step 2. This
is required only for BYOL licenses.
No. of Splunk Indexers
(SplunkIndexerCount)
3 The number of Splunk Enterprise instances to launch. You can
choose from 3 to 10 instances.
Indexer Disk Size
(SplunkIndexerDiskSize)
100 The size of the EBS volume attached to the Splunk Enterprise
indexers, in GiB. You can choose a value between 50-16,000.
For guidance, see Instance Selection earlier in this guide.
Enable Search Head
Cluster?
(SHCEnabled)
no Set this parameter to yes to deploy a Splunk search head
cluster. (The default setting creates a single search head.) For
guidance, see Search Head Clustering earlier in this guide.
Replication Factor
(SplunkReplicationFactor)
3 The number of copies of data to store in the Splunk indexer
cluster. You can choose from 2-5 copies. For guidance, see
Indexers earlier in this guide.
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AWS Quick Start Configuration:
Parameter label
(name)
Default Description
Quick Start S3 Bucket
Name
(QSS3BucketName)
quickstart-
reference
S3 bucket where the Quick Start templates and scripts are
installed. Use this parameter to specify the S3 bucket name
you’ve created for your copy of Quick Start assets, if you decide
to customize or extend the Quick Start for your own use. The
bucket name can include numbers, lowercase letters,
uppercase letters, and hyphens, but should not start or end
with a hyphen.
Quick Start S3 Key
Prefix
(QSS3KeyPrefix)
splunk/enterprise/
latest
The S3 key name prefix used to simulate a folder for your copy
of Quick Start assets, if you decide to customize or extend the
Quick Start for your own use. This prefix can include numbers,
lowercase letters, uppercase letters, hyphens, and forward
slashes, but should not start or end with a forward slash
(which is automatically added).
5. On the Options page, you can specify tags (key-value pairs) for resources in your stack
and set advanced options. When you’re done, choose Next.
6. On the Review page, review and confirm the template settings. Under Capabilities,
select the check box to acknowledge that the template will create IAM resources.
7. Choose Create to deploy the stack.
8. Monitor the status of the stack. When the status is CREATE_COMPLETE, the Splunk
Enterprise cluster is ready.
9. Use the URLs displayed in the Outputs tab for the stack to view the resources that were
created.
Step 4. Send Data to the Splunk Indexers When your Splunk deployment has finished provisioning, the next step is to start sending
data to your indexers.
If you have application logs on your instances that need to be sent to Splunk, our general
recommendation is to use our universal forwarder to send data to your index cluster.
The Splunk universal forwarder documentation covers all of the steps you’ll need to do
this.
To ingest and visualize data from many of the most common AWS services, Splunk has
built the Splunk Add-On for AWS and Splunk App for AWS. The add-on is the data
ingestion mechanism, while the app has dozens of pre-built dashboards to help you
visualize your entire AWS ecosystem.
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Troubleshooting
If you encounter a CREATE_FAILED error when you launch the Quick Start, we
recommend that you relaunch the template with Rollback on failure set to No. (This
setting is under Advanced in the AWS CloudFormation console, Options page.) With this
setting, the stack’s state will be retained and the instance will be left running, so you can
troubleshoot the issue. (You'll want to look at the log files /var/log/cloud-init-
output.log and /var/log/cloud-init.log)
Important When you set Rollback on failure to No, you’ll continue to
incur AWS charges for this stack. Please make sure to delete the stack when
you’ve finished troubleshooting.
For additional information, see Troubleshooting AWS CloudFormation on the AWS website
or contact us on the AWS Quick Start Discussion Forum.
Additional Resources
AWS services
Amazon EC2
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/
AWS CloudFormation
https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/cloudformation/
Amazon VPC
https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/vpc/
Amazon EBS
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/AmazonEBS.html
Elastic Load Balancing
https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/
Splunk Enterprise
Product documentation
http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/
Manual implementation guide
https://www.splunk.com/pdfs/white-papers/splunk-enterprise-on-aws-deployment-
guidelines.pdf
Amazon Web Services – Splunk Enterprise on the AWS Cloud February 2017
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Splunk on AWS Tech Brief
https://www.splunk.com/pdfs/technical-briefs/deploying-splunk-enterprise-on-
amazon-web-services-technical-brief.pdf
Splunk Add-on for Amazon Web Services
https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/1876/
Splunk App for AWS
https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/1274/
Quick Start reference deployments
AWS Quick Start home page
https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/
Send Us Feedback We welcome your questions and comments. Please post your feedback on the AWS Quick
Start Discussion Forum.
You can visit our GitHub repository to download the templates and scripts for this Quick
Start, and to share your customizations with others.
Document Revisions Date Change In sections
February 2017 Initial publication —
Amazon Web Services – Splunk Enterprise on the AWS Cloud February 2017
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© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates, and Splunk, Inc. All rights reserved.
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